The present invention relates to a cell culture apparatus for culturing cells and in particular to an automatic culturing technology for culturing cells efficiently with aseptic cleanliness.
Cell culture operations have been performed by hand by skilled operators under severe manufacturing processes within utterly disinfected clean rooms. When cells are cultured in large quantities aiming at industrialization, therefore, there are possibilities of the occurrence of increases in burdens on operators, time and cost required for training operators, human errors and sample mix-ups, and biological pollution (contamination) by humans carrying bacteria, requiring considerable cost for taking countermeasures. That is an obstacle to the industrialization of mass cell culture.
It is therefore expected that these problems will be solved by automating a series of culture operations by instruments. Currently automatic culture apparatuses following manual culture operations using articulated robot manipulators are mainly developed. Manual culture operations are, however, performed by complicated actions. In such culture apparatuses it is required to perform handling of culture vessels and culture fluids aseptically equally with manual operations or in a simplified manner.
To this end, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2006-149268 provides an example for performing transfer operations for a culture vessel and culture medium exchange by an articulated robot manipulator. It is shown that the articulated robot manipulator itself can be sterilized.
As another example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2002-315566 provides a processing method with a culture vessel and a flow channel system themselves hermetically sealed. The method hermetically seals the culture vessel and the flow channel and takes out the culture vessel and partly capped flow channel in such a manner they are not exposed to the outside air after the end of culture in an apparatus for culturing cartilage cells by applying high pressure thereto, in which means for collecting aseptically produced cartilaginous tissue is provided.